One of the most amazing news stories of the past few years is the story of Illinois Republican Governor George Ryan. Apparently Ryan is about to issue pardons for all of the inmates on death row in Illinois. If you’re like me, you have to read that twice to believe it, in this era of hardline punishment freaks. Yes, a Republican governor is going to issue a blanket commutation for the death sentences of 156 inmates.
Ryan has been investigating the investigations of these men for about two years, ever since it was discovered that a substantial number of them were wrongfully convicted. A law professor in Chicago had made it a personal hobby to reinvestigate capital cases and had remarkable success in showing police incompetence, brutality, and deceit in these cases. After looking at all of them closely, Ryan simply lost confidence in the system. He didn’t believe that he could believe, with any degree of certainty, that any of the men it was his job to have executed was actually guilty of the crime he was convicted of.
In spite of my sympathy for their losses, I always find it repulsive when the families of a murder victim express their horror, shock, and dismay, that they won’t get to see the murderer fry. There are loads of euphemisms for that desire– one of the ugliest and dumbest is the word “closure”– but it always strikes me as nothing more than a passionate desire to do unto the perpetrator the very horror he has visited upon us, and that is illogical. Murder is horrible and evil and obscene, and the evil that it does to us is not undone by repeating the action.
It is undone by acts like those of George Ryan, which show that occasionally we humans can be better than murderers.